Did the designer of the LGBTQ Rainbow Flag deliberately omit a pink stripe from the color scheme in order to emphasize sexuality, materialism, and Satanism? No, that's not true: Gilbert Baker, who came up with the idea for the banner in 1978, had wanted to include a pink band, but the manufacturer didn't have the right kind of dye.
The claim appeared in a Hungarian-language video on TikTok (archived here) on January 1, 2023, with a caption reading:
EDUCATION PURPOSE ONLY The secrets of the LGBTQ flag
A narrator says:
A human being has seven energetic centers, or chakras. Like a real rainbow, these have seven colors... The LGBTQ flag's colors match these chakras, just upside down, and the seventh chakra [colored hot pink in the video] is chopped off. What does this mean? That the people who created LGBTQ gave primacy to sexuality and materialism. In reality, the crown chakra is on top of all the others, and it symbolizes a person's connectedness with God and the universe. It's no accident that they got rid of this chakra, or the seventh color. The LGBTQ flag symbolizes a person who has turned against his own nature, twisted away from the divine being, suffused with sexuality and materialism. What's more, the LGBTQ flag is made up of six colors, which for millennia has been commonly known as the number of the devil... Of course, this doesn't mean that the people parading on the streets with LGBTQ flags are Satanists. Most of them have no idea about the flag's true meaning. (All translations by Lead Stories.)
Here is a screenshot from the video taken at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 21 12:53:51 2023 UTC)
Gilbert Baker, the late artist and drag queen who created the Rainbow Flag in 1978, had originally intended to use eight colors on the banner, but eventually had to cut pink and turquoise. At the 3:48 mark of an interview published on NBC News' YouTube channel on June 23, 2016, he explained:
The first thing I found out when I went to the flag company to get help making [the flags] was that pink does not exist as a color in the very limited palette that they used for making flags. About 25 colors, and you know, they told me, pink is not one of them. So, even though I was scrambling to find pink, ran out of pink pretty fast, so I had to make a compromise, if you will.
In 1979, the new Rainbow Flag was used by marchers protesting the assassination of openly gay politician Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Organizers decided to drop the turquoise stripe in order to evenly split the flag's colors along either side of the parade route, according to an article on the website of activist group Gay Pride New Orleans. LGBTQ activists have used the six-colored Rainbow Flag ever since.
In an interview with San Francisco's ABC7 News published on March 2, 2017, Baker explained what each color on his original design stood for:
Pink is for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun... green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity and purple for the spirit. I like to think of those elements as in every person, everyone shares that.
